PlayStation 3 Pricing Revealed? 187
Jakhel writes "IGN has up an article on PS3 pricing information. Apparently it comes straight from Sony officials. From the article: 'According an article published in the May 17th edition of Japan's Mainichi Shimbun, the PlayStation 3 could be one of the most expensive mass-market videogame consoles ever created. Officials from Sony apparently told the newspaper that PlayStation 3s would sell in Japan for "less than 50,000 yen each." That translates to about $465 US dollars.' So I guess they will be around $464.99 in the U.S. (plus tax of course). Granted, it does come with DVD Hi Def support out of the box, but is that enough to justify it's nearly $500 pricetag?" Commentary on this development available at GamesIndustry.biz as well.
Bargain (Score:4, Interesting)
The "mainstream" console players, however, may find it harder to justify the higher price tag. Especially if the XBox 360 retails for a couple hundred less.
Re:Bargain (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, a finished, working PS3 doesn't exist now either. In a year and a half, who knows?
m-
Wish I had mod points... (Score:2)
I, for one, will buy at least one of these...
Simple economics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Simple economics (Score:2)
Re:Wish I had mod points... (Score:2)
Re:Bargain (Score:2)
Everything else is already peachy with me. Can't wait for Warhawk and God of War II!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Bargain (Score:2)
You sound pretty sure of that. The cell smokes any available CPU, at least at the type of calculations important to games. "The RSX is more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards" It does 51 billion dot products per second, with 300 million transistors. I'm betting that's a lot more than what's going in your PC, nice as it may be. These platforms are qualatively different than what came before, with the ability to run many threads at once.
Even if the graphics
Re:Bargain (Score:2)
Re:Bargain (Score:2)
In the end, it's more arguably more meaningfull than 'number of polys a second', as all DP's are equal, and all polys are not. A chip that can do twice the number of DP's a second is going to do better in the real world.
Of course, this means little about the real world performance of a particular console, as that can depend
Probably Still Worth It. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:1)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:5, Insightful)
From the specs released, the Xbox360 and PS3 sound kinda the same for now. You've got to understand that Sony has a history of severely over-hyping the power of their upcoming console. Furthermore, until we see more detailed specs, we're not sure what bottlenecks might arise in the PS3's architecture.
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no doubt that Sony has greatly overhyped the PS3, and that the two consoles are quite close in real world performance. However, Sony has certainly removed
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
You're kidding right? Have you looked at an xbox and ps2 game side by side? There is a huge difference in the detail each machine is capable of rendering, and the ps2 does NOT come out on top
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
GT4 was a huge disappointment for me. It was GT3 with more cars (where "more cars" is mostly "a version of a different car with a different paint scheme"). There was no remarkable improvement on any aspect of the game (physics, graphics, multiplayer, or sound). Unless you're referring to the "picture mode", in which case I'd hardly use that as a basis of comparison.
That being said, it is still a good game (the Grand Tou
Over-hyped by maybe a little (Score:3, Interesting)
Three orders of magnitude less expensive in two years? I don't think so. Processors don't move that fast. I could maybe see 20 gflop but even that's pushing it.
Re:Over-hyped by maybe a little (Score:2)
Re:Over-hyped by maybe a little (Score:2)
And yet, they're claiming their GPU pumps out twice the floating point performance of the Xbox 360 GPU (if you work backwards from their claims for total system performance). The clock rate of the two GPU is pretty close (500MHz vs. 600MHz),
Re:Over-hyped by maybe a little (Score:2)
However, you can skew the results very easily by taking a sample of small flop count processes, or by skewing the types of floating point operations to ones that don't take as long, making the average
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
I don't think we're able to sense how powerful the PS2 is. We'll notice some improvement with PS3 (mostly graphics), but there's no way we'll realize the actual improvement. Ports and developer kits will probably not use the increased power for first generation games. Full potential is always greater than realized potential.
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:3, Insightful)
It just seems that the Xbox 360 is an evolutionary upgrade, which is perfectly fine since the Xbox still could have h
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2)
Half the market for video games are children and teenagers who depend on their parents to buy them this. I'd spend up to about $200 on a console for the family and that's about it... I don't care how powerful it is or how much my kids want it, $200 is my limit.
A big part of that limit is the cost of games. If they want to make the console more expensive fine, but the only way to win me back would be to lower the price of the games.
Re:Probably Still Worth It. (Score:2, Insightful)
If they want to make the console more expensive fine, but the only way to win me back would be to lower the price of the games....
Sadly, the price of a console and the price of games for it are fairly directly related. If the console costs more, it follows that it should be more powerful, so the games for it probably cost more to make than they would on a lower-end console. This cost is, of course, made up for by charging more for the game.
less than 50,000 yen (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't expect to see the PS3 come down at $450. If I were a betting man I'd say $299.
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't expect to see the PS3 come down at $450. If I were a betting man I'd say $299.
This is elementary marketing, you _must_ have run into it before. When touting your own product you want to make it seem as cheap as possible, so you pick how much it costs (or how much you think it will cost) add a tiny increment, and say it costs less than that.
If a store advertises that they have something for "less than $10" you can be pretty sure it will cost $9.99. That's certainly what a "betting man" would go with. Also note that there is a certain amount of psychology in the "look" of the price. Subtracting one cent has a greater psychological effect than the actual price difference merits, especially when you you're talking about a psychologically significant barrier such as $1, $10, $100 or $1000, and to a lesser extent $5, $25, $50, and any other multiple of 10 or 100.
If Sony _knew_ they were going to sell it at $299 they would be saying "less than $300" (or whatever the yen equivalent of that is.) The fact that they're not saying that indicates they think there is a reasonably strong possibility that it will cost more than that.
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:2)
but i'm saying that this is probably a quote from someone that isn't authorized to mention a price saying something obvious. less than $465.
when someone asks me something that is covered under an NDA i always exaggerate and say its less than that. "how many networks do you peer with" was a question I got very often in previous jobs, and my answer was always "less than a thousand".
get it now? i'm betting that this
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:2)
i'm betting that this quote is by someone that isn't authorized to say anything.
Now that i'm doubtful of. I don't think officials from Sony would be giving interviews to newspapers w
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:3, Insightful)
If Sony knew it were going to sell for $299, they sure as hell wouldn't let anybody know that this early.
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:2)
I don't see how Sony could maneuver MSFT here. Remember that the XBox 360 will be out for a few months to a year before the PS3 or Nintendo's box. So MSFT will have no competition during this interval, and they can sell the product at whatever price they want. If Sony leaks a price of $500, MSFT can set the initial price to $499 and, when the PS3 finally comes out, cut the price to match Sony's.
History lesson (Score:2)
Re:Context (Score:2)
Yes. Prices in Japan are generally higher for electronics, and the upgrade cycle is much shorter. You don't want to be seen with a 2 year old digital camera. And 40,000 yen is the cost of a night out in a big city.
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to post this exact thing - the fact is Sony probably doesn't know what the pricing is going to be yet. But there is an obvious ceiling that they can point to and say "we're pretty confident we can bring the costs in below this number". That doesn't mean they won't be able to bring them down even further, and it doesn't mean they won't choose to sell the system at even more of a loss in a grab for market share.
We don't know the original context for this. (As a side note, I don't know why the blurb here links to IGN - the official translation of the original article is on the Mainichi web site here [mainichi.co.jp], if you want to see the source for this.) We don't know what was said in the original Japanese interview (there's no actual quote here, it's all paraphrased) and we don't know what question was asked of Sony. It could have been something like "how much would you need to sell a PS3 for to turn a profit?" for all we know.
My guess is the PS3 will be priced to compete with the Xbox 360; whatever the Xbox is at, the PS3 will be at.
Also keep in mind that pricing in Japan and the US rarely correlates directly on game consoles. The disconnect can be upwards of $100 in some cases.
Re:less than 50,000 yen (Score:2)
No (Score:1)
Re:No (Score:1)
Re:No (Score:2)
Heh. (Score:2)
Re:Heh. (Score:2)
Re:Heh. (Score:2)
$360
It's slightly more than the reasonable rollout price of $299 that we've seen on XBox/PS2 previously, and sticks below the weird $400 price for a "dedicated gaming machine" that a lot of early adopters and parents of spoiled kids may balk at.
Re:Heh. (Score:2)
I think Sony CAN charge more because of the HD DVD. I won't spend $400 for a pure gaming system when the graphics of my current Xbox are still fine....but I was planning on getting an HD DVD anyways, so $400 for a HD DVD plus a kickass gaming system isn't such a b
Re:Heh. (Score:3, Interesting)
How this works into the PS3's US based pricing strategy is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't just take a price in Yen, convert it, and assume that will be the price in dollars.
That's microsoft thinking (Score:2)
Re:Heh. (Score:2)
The people that made Goldeneye and Perfect Dark left Rare long ago.
Seen this before? (Score:1)
Re:Seen this before? (Score:1)
Re:Seen this before? (Score:2)
Price Match (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Price Match (Score:2)
I actually wouldn't be shocked if Sony decided to use a price point just slightly higher than whatever Microsoft picks, at least at first, with a rather justified "and worth every penny" mentality. "You're getting a Blu-ray player as well", that sort of thing... extra network ports, all that. "Factor in the cost of a Blu-ray player, router, and the fact that it simply has better graphics, it's worth more than the XBox360". Also expect typical Sony 'bargain bu
Re:Price Match (Score:2)
what about what happened with the PSP (Score:2, Insightful)
on the other hand, they have made a lot of money on the sale of the PSP unit, so they can afford to loose money on the PS3. Considering Sony's game library size, it would probably be a good idea
Hi Def DVD?? (Score:1)
Re:Hi Def DVD?? (Score:2)
I can't imagine that it would be that big a deal to switch out the drive from true Blue-Ray to whatever the new standard would be before the PS3s ship. Costly, certainly. Maybe requiring a small programming change on the PS3 motherboard. But other than that...
Re:Hi Def DVD?? (Score:2)
Re:Hi Def DVD?? (Score:2)
(even in my PS2)
My nephews are on their 3rd PS2 (I've been more lucky, but mine doesn't get as much use). The PS1 also was notorious for disk drive failures. I'm also hoping that Sony improves their standards. There was a time when Sony was known for quality components.
Re:Hi Def DVD?? (Score:2)
(And thought)
Maybe this is what he means!
Force parents to let their kids out? (Score:2, Insightful)
Parent 1: "Oh yeah? Well, my $600 bought my kid an extra 100Kg! Can you beat that?"
Parent 2: "Aww hell, I could only afford a $20 NES system that he doesn't even play. He's lost 60Kg just by playing outside! Its awful!"
Re:Force parents to let their kids out? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Force parents to let their kids out? (Score:1, Insightful)
While you may have a point of people/kids getting less excersise nowadays, it doesn't exclude having videogames in there.
i may have allready made my mind up, but... (Score:1)
No (Score:1)
Re:No (Score:2)
yes its worth nearly $500 (Score:1)
Perhaps they will have a stripped down games-only version later.
PSP Price (Score:2)
I would also imagine that the next Nintendo will be less expensive than the other 2 systems.
Price Wars Part Deux (Score:2)
After covering videogame news for years I know this all to well,
Young minds continue (Score:2)
You think sales are going to dwindle because you and your friends are getting older? That would probably be true if no children where born after you and your friends. That is not how it works however, and the population continues to grow (albiet slowly now in the states). That only means that the market is growing, (past customers plus new customers coming into the age group). I think that you will be surprised if you look at the real nu
Re:Young minds continue (Score:2)
Making the systems into media consoles and upping the price to appeal to u
Re:Young minds continue (Score:2)
"My main point being that the target audience for the XBOX and PS2 are NO LONGER the target audience"
That statement seems to say that you think they are trying to sell to the wrong group now. The truth is that you moved out of that group by aging. They aren't targeting you any more, at least with the diligence that they did when you were in that age group. Perhaps we are saying the same thing, but your choice o
Re:Young minds continue (Score:2)
My age group should
Re:Price Wars Part Deux (Score:2)
Ill pass for now (Score:3, Insightful)
Its never a good idea to buy them when they are first out as within 6 months normaly the price will half.
Re:Ill pass for now (Score:2)
That's a huge exaggeration. The GameCube dropped to $100 on September 25th, 2003, the Xbox hit $150 on March 29th, 2004, and the PlayStation 2 waited till May 11th, 2004. So roughly 2 to 4 years, not within 6 months.
Re:Ill pass for now (Score:2)
I was simply saying don't buy at first
If they really want to eat up everyone's lunch... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I've read through the specs. It would be difficult - not impossible - but very, very difficult to emulate the XBox 360 on the PS3 with an acceptable quality.
But imagine the rewards of doing so...
</pipedream>
Note: It may be impossible to do in a practical time frame and amount of resources, but I still claim it's possible. I doubt the inverse is possible - the XBox 360 playing PS3 games.
-Adam
Re:If they really want to eat up everyone's lunch. (Score:2)
I have a feeling that MS would darken the sky above you with lawyers if you tried that.
Re:If they really want to eat up everyone's lunch. (Score:2)
That expensive? (Score:2, Funny)
On the plus side, you'll lose weight before you gain even more.
$500 in Tokyo... (Score:3, Funny)
ok now i'm upset (Score:2)
That's where I draw the line. Get Greenspan on the phone!
=P
e.
Most Expensive Mass Market console? (Score:2)
Re:Most Expensive Mass Market console? (Score:2)
It seemed worth it at the time to play Way of the Warrior, but I don't think I'd spend that much money on a console again.
That statistic is completely meaningless (Score:2)
The average price of an 1100 square foot home in Japan is over $350,000.
The average price of an 1100 square foot home in the United States is a shade over $210,000.
That suggests that prices in Japan are about 166% higher than those in America. What happens if you take the $300 price tag of the PS2 and add
I'm sure console prices will get higher (Score:2)
BR> People will still get it. They hope it wont cost that much but if it does they'll pay for it one way or another.
Server Edition (Score:2)
The Client was supposed to be the bare bones game console. And the Server was supposed to be this uber media hub. I cringe at the thought of paying $500 for a gaming system. And I don't think Sony has done a good enough job to convice people that their next system can be more than just a gaming and
For that much money... (Score:2)
Re:Blame the Weak Dollar (Score:1)
Re:Blame the Weak Dollar (Score:2)
It may not be obvious just yet, but that paycheck you get is now worth perhaps half what it used to be a few years ago due to poor economic policy in the US.
A) Its BECAUSE of a specific strategy that the gov has purposely let the dollar fall. Presumably to put pressure on China, Malaysia, Korea and the tons of other countries that have artificially pegged currencies. B) In the case of Japan, they have been playing with their currency to make make their e
Re:Blame the Weak Dollar (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, when buying japanese goods, the US dollar is worth only 10% less than it was two years ago [yahoo.com]. When buying from China, where most of the goods imported into the US come from, it's worth exactly the same amount it was two years ago.
The US economy is huge, so effects take a while to propegate. you will notice it first on imported goods, then local goods, then you will hopefully still be able to pay for food. I sure hope you arn't paycheck to paycheck right now with no ability to cut back.
This comment got modded up? Please go home Mr. Troll.
Re:Interesting (Score:1)
Re:bad news for sony (Score:2)
Re:bad news for sony (Score:2)
Re:bad news for sony (Score:2)